to learn that Tariq Ramadan, the Islamist ‘thinker’, had been given a job at St Antony’s College, Oxford,

though it became less surprising to me when I learned that his chair had been endowed by the Qataris. [Ramadan’s title is His Highness Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa bin Hamad bin Abdullah bin Jassim bin Mohammed al-Thani Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies.]

Dalrymple comments:

That the university had prostituted itself in this way seemed to me also to be emblematic of the condition of the university’s country as a whole: a hybrid of Augean stable and brothel.